Turtleface and Beyond by Arthur Bradford Read Free Book Online

blackflies. William didn’t last long once the warm weather set in. His lungs began to give out for good.
    I tried to take him back out to the shack with me one day in early June but my car got stuck in the mud on the way there and he said, “Aw, to hell with it. I bequeath my belongings to the porcupine.”
    It was JoAnne who held William’s hand as he took his last breath, lying there in that dusty bed at the farmhouse, and all of us sang some silly song before the ambulance arrived and took him away.
    JoAnne left town that fall, after William had been buried. She headed for Alaska, where last I heard she was working on a fishing boat. I left the farmhouse as well, done, like so many hippies before me, with that particular experiment. On my way out of town I took a detour out to William’s shack. Already the summer vegetation had grown thick around it. Already that little shack was getting swallowed up by the land. The door had been gnawed thin by the porcupine and inside there were little brown pellets, animal droppings scattered about the floor. I left the black-and-white TV set there on William’s sunken armchair, plugged into the rusty generator with its wire antenna pointed skyward. It would be there for the porcupine, should he ever find the need to conjure its powers.

 
    LOST LIMBS
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    It wasn’t until my second date with Lenore that I discovered one of her arms was missing. Our first meeting had been a blind date, arranged by a friend who had neglected to mention this arm situation. I suppose I’m not a particularly observant person. This is something I’ve been told on a number of occasions. Lenore wore a very well made prosthesis though, and I believe it was an understandable oversight on my part.
    My next-door neighbor at the time was a magician named Clifford and on the weekends he performed at a club called Singing Henry’s. There was no singer named Henry involved with the place. That’s just what they called it. I decided to ask Lenore if she wanted to go see Clifford’s magic show for our second date.
    Lenore said yes and when I stopped by to pick her up I noticed there was a set of metal hook-pincers where her hand was supposed to be.
    â€œHey, what’s this?” I said. I thought perhaps she was playing some kind of odd prank.
    â€œIt’s my hand,” she said.
    â€œNo, it’s not.”
    â€œIt’s a prosthesis,” she said.
    She rolled up her sleeve to just below her shoulder so that I could see where her flesh ended and the device began. It was held on by a suction cup and two spandex straps.
    â€œWell, okay,” I said. How could I have missed that?
    â€œDid you have that thing on before?” I asked. “When we went out before?”
    â€œIt’s called a prosthesis,” said Lenore. “I was wearing a different arm that night. It had rubber fingers. It’s less noticeable, but not as useful.”
    Lenore stepped back into her apartment and retrieved the rubber arm. I still don’t know how this device escaped my notice. Upon even a cursory glance it was immediately apparent that the arm wasn’t real. The fingers didn’t even move! But that’s the way things are in life, I’ve found. Once you learn some fact, then all the clues become obvious and you feel like you should have known it all along.
    The magic show was extremely lousy and I kept looking over to see how Lenore managed to clap with her prosthetic arm. She would raise it up a bit and then just pat down on the forearm part. This method didn’t produce much noise, but Clifford didn’t deserve much. Watching Lenore clap was more interesting than most of the magic tricks.
    After each trick Clifford would yell, “And voilà!” and we’d all have to cheer for him. This became tiresome, but he did do one trick toward the end which I found impressive. He grabbed a live dove out of a cage, then he smacked it